God's body has self-destructed and His skull is now in
orbit directly above Times Square, triggering a plague of "death
awareness" and causing the United States to resemble
fourteenth-century Europe during the Black Death.

As the epidemic accelerates, two people fight to
preserve life and sanity: Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will
stop at nothing to rescue her only son, and Gerard Korty, a
brilliant sculptor struggling to to create a masterwork that will
heal the metaphysical wounds caused by God's abdication. Among
other apocalyptic wonders, Morrow depicts a pitched battle between
Jews and anti-Semites on a New Jersey golf course ... a theater
troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic ... and the
villainy of Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new church in
Coatzacoalcos and inventor of a cure more dreadful than any
disease.

The symptoms of Abulic
Plague -- the deadly epidemic that results when God's gigantic skull
begins looming over Western civilization -- are both physical and
metaphysical. Each victim is haunted by his own private "fetch," a
satanic doppelgänger bent on dragging him to his grave. When
schoolteacher Nora Burkhart realizes that her young son has
contracted the disease, her grief is soon supplanted by her hope of
finding an effective treatment. Nora is determined to battle Kevin's
fetch to the end.

Our
heroine's odyssey takes her and Kevin southward through an America
utterly transformed by the pestilence. Nora survives the Battle of
Paramus, runs afoul of flagellants, and falls in love with an actor
who perversely presents a production of Gilgamesh the King
to humanity's remaining remnants. Reaching New Orleans, Nora
convinces ship captain Anthony Van Horne to pilot her across the
Gulf of Mexico to Coatzacoalcos, where the mysterious Dr. Adrian
Lucido has reportedly developed a cure for the Plague.

In Coatzacoalcos
Nora manages to get Kevin into the Lucido Clinic. While therapists
treat the ailing child, Nora befriends a sculptor named Gerard
Korty, whose studio lies far up the Uspanapa River. Korty is
completing his magnum opus: a huge sculpture of the human brain
wrought from a chunk of the asteroid that caused the great
Cretaceous dying -- "the dinosaurs' tombstone," as he puts it. If
Korty is correct, his masterwork will help humanity renew itself
once the Plague passes.

To her horror Nora
learns that the cures effected by the Lucido Clinic are not
necessarily permanent. But her true destiny, it develops, extends
beyond the salvation of a single child. One night Nora's own fetch
leads her through the jungle to the summit of a Maya pyramid. With
the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, Nora experiences visions of the
viable and humane civilization that may conceivably emerge in the
wake of the Plague. But first Nora must become the paladin of
Korty's numinous sculpture, a commitment that could lead to her
death.

Illustrations from Dante's Divine Comedy by
Gustave Dore.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

"There's a bit of the later Mark Twain here, a hint
of Dante, a dab of T.S. Eliot. and a lot of knowledge and sympathy
for the human condition. It's all in a package that will rock you
back in your chair and make you take notice on almost every page."

Jim HopperThe San Diego Union

"The death of God and resulting apocalyptic events
narrated here provide food for philosophic and theologic
speculation. But its wicked comic riffs on modern faith and
faithlessness make the book crackle and burn ... (Nora Burkhart's)
journey takes her through a surreal post-apocalyptic American
landscape whose vision of catastrophic survival is, all at once,
uproarious, scary, unthinkable, and weirdly plausible."

Laura DemanskiThe Baltimore Sun

"Any novel that springs from a sparkling intellect
rather than a dreary neurosis is cause for celebration, and The
Eternal Footman, with its load of truth and laughter,
justifies a considerable quantity of champagne."

Tom Robbins
author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

"Morrow finds a positive vision for his unhinged
world as he brilliantly wraps up one of the wildest series ever
written."

Fred CleaverThe Denver Post

"What holds the book together ... is Morrow's
powerful evocation of emotional extremity, especially the alarm
and tenderness felt by a parent for an ailing child."

Gregory FeeleyThe Philadelphia Inquirer

"In all, another gorgeous Morrovian performance,
another paen to the ductility and power of both satire and
speculative fiction in the hands of a virtuoso at the top of his
game."

Michael BishopThe New York Review of Science Fiction

"Morrow's insanely ingenious plot, reminiscent,
variously, of B-science fiction movies in the 1950's, Evelyn
Waugh's The Loved One, and Terry Southern at his most
charmingly deranged, brings together several characters unwilling
to accept evidence of their planet's (and their own) mortality..."

Kirkus Reviews

"Morrow understands theology like a theologian and
psychology like a psychologist, but he writes like an angel. The
Eternal Footman takes the reader on a journey through an
undiscovered country where everything is at once utterly strange
and wrenchingly familiar."

Richard Elliott Friedman
author of The Hidden Book in the Bible

"The trilogy concluded with The Eternal Footman
is one of the finest and most timely literary products of its
day."

Brian StablefordParadoxa

"Morrow leaves aside cutting satire to achieve
something more, at once eloquent, intellectual, tragicomic, and
surprisingly optimistic. The Eternal Footman may be a
deliberately quirky, untidy book, but there's real greatness here,
its virtues unencumbered by a quest for the ideal."

Faren MillerLocus

FAITH JUSTICE INTERVIEWS JAMES MORROW
ON "THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN"

This exchange is excerpted from a conversation that
occurred between Faith Justice and James Morrow on iUniverse.com.

FJ: I've always admired your quirky complicated
characters -- people just on the edge of mainstream, neighbors
with a twist. You did it again in The Eternal Footman with
Nora Burkhart, the ex-English teacher and flower-delivery person,
and Gerard Korty, the reclusive "modern Michelangelo." Where did
they come from?

JM: A common criticism of SF is that it settles for
far too simplistic an understanding of the human psyche. In the
words of Thomas Disch, the genre lacks "a decent sense of
despair." It's a fair complaint, I feel. There's certainly no
evidence that, as our species becomes increasingly dependent on
technology and our world becomes increasingly science-fictional,
we're losing our psychological complexity. Indeed, most people
would argue that inner turmoil and ineffable existential dread
have increased in the post-industrial age.

Nobody in a feudal fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or Dune
experiences anxiety attacks of unknown origin. Nobody has to cope
with migraines or hemorrhoids or suicidal depression. Maybe they
shouldn't. Maybe that kind of realism would destroy the very
conventions that permit such novels to delight us. But I do
worry when an author places a caste system at the center of a
novel and then fails to ask searching questions about it. To make
any sense of the Dune books, you have assume that the
average Sardaukar storm-trooper or Bene Gesserit witch has nothing
that we would call an inner life. That's not a leap I enjoy
making.

Having said all this, let me hasten to confess that I've always
found characterization to be the hardest aspect of novel-writing.
I conceive of my stories in terms of themes and situations first,
human psychology second. If I were completely honest, I'd have to
admit that the main reason I give my characters vivid
occupations -- Murray Katz processing snapshots, George Paxton
carving tombstones, Nora Burkhart delivering flowers, Gerard Korty
sculpting the Divine Comedy -- is that it simplifies the
characterization problem. This strategy affords me lots of
"objective correlatives" for my character's mental states,
including their self-doubts and neuroses. That's better than the
stupid conceit of a worry-free Sardaukar, but it's certainly not
the highest variety of psychological fiction. I'm not Dostoyevsky.

FJ: You've described Towing Jehovah as a
fantastical Lord Jim and Blameless in Abaddon as a
retelling of the Book of Job. What are the literary roots of The
Eternal
Footman?

JM: Its primary touchstone is The Epic of
Gilgamesh. I'm not very subtle about this ancestry. My
heroine spends part of the novel traveling with a theatre company
that's producing a more-or-less faithful adaptation of
Gilgamesh in a succession of southern towns.

We hear a lot these days, especially from academic precincts,
about the deterministic nature of human language and culture.
There is no such thing as a universal human spirit, the postmodern
intellectuals argue. All realities -- moral, epistemological,
psychological -- are ultimately "local," conditioned by immediate
social and linguistic norms. Even science, the postmoderns say,
can be profitable scrutinized through this radically relativistic
lens.

And yet here's Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving
epic, speaking to us with poignancy and immediacy about the
bedrock tragedy of the human condition. The theme is the
inescapability of death, and the poem tells us how utterly human
it is to wish that things were otherwise. If Gilgamesh is
essentially "local," then I say the hell with it.

The Eternal Footman also owes a debt to Camus's The
Plague and to Peter Barnes's marvelous play about the Black
Death, Red Noses. As I've commented elsewhere, it's
possible to map the whole Godhead Trilogy onto the Divine Comedy.
Towing Jehovah corresponds to the Purgatorio --
the characters are trapped in a gray domain defined by their moral
limitations. Blameless in Abaddon is the Inferno
in a different key. ("Abaddon" is a Hebrew word that can be
translated as "hell.") And Footman, with its glimpses of a
post-theistic utopia, might be regarded as a kind of Paradiso.
But this is all rather cerebral. Let's drop it and go on to the
next question.

FJ: You've lamented that, unlike nineteenth-century
writers, modern novels deal primarily with "quotidian life and its
discontents." What are the grand questions you wrestle with in
this trilogy, and did you come up with any answers?

JM: No, let's not go on to the next
question. Aaarggh! I'm overwhelmed! This is a great question, but
I could spend the rest of the week trying to answer it!

Let me attempt an end run around the problem. Let me talk briefly
about the gap between the cosmic riddles I thought I'd be
confronting in the Godhead Trilogy and the riddles I really did
confront.

Before I actually wrote Towing Jehovah, I'd assumed it
would be a satire on the common notion that, when a society loses
faith in God, it ceases to be moral. But eventually I took the
theme much more seriously, and I ended up giving theism its due.
Once the crew of the Carpco Valparaiso discovers that
nobody is peering down from Heaven, they lose their moral compass:
murders and orgies start becoming the norm.

But only temporarily. By the end of act two, the Kantian
categorical imperative has taken hold, and the crew starts
behaving decently again. So a novel that began life as a kind of
science-fictional joke -- what if God died? -- ended up addressing
other sorts of questions. How do we account for ethical behavior?
What might a non-theistic morality look like? Do we behave
decently merely because we fear divine retribution, or are we a
better species than that?

I went into Blameless in Abaddon knowing that the plot
would revolve around God's long overdue trial for crimes against
humanity. But until I began investigating theodicy in depth, I had
no idea that the case for the defense could be so rich and
complex. Christian theologians have been explaining God's
ostensible complicity in human suffering for nearly 2,000 years,
and they've accomplished a lot -- so much, in fact, that I decided
to have the World Court judges return a "not guilty" verdict. And
here I thought a single case of childhood cancer would make the
prosecution's case!

But there's a problem, of course. Because after you've hammered
together your beautiful little theodicy -- whether you're Saint
Augustine or C. S. Lewis -- you're still stuck with that suffering
child. So while the World Court was ultimately willing to let God
off the hook, you can be sure that James Morrow was not.

On the drawing board, The Eternal Footman was supposed to
address the following theme: "No matter what the clerics tell us,
death means nothing but oblivion, and it's also the primary source
from which the world's religions draw their energy." But during
the composition process, I realized that death is a more ambiguous
phenomenon than my original notes allowed. I still have no use for
it in my personal life, but I can see how -- from the broadest
evolutionary and historical perspective -- the case for death's
necessity is probably even better than the case for God's
goodness.

As for the notion that death-denial lies at the heart of most
religions, I have one of the characters in Footman say
this very explicitly. But I'm no longer prepared to reduce
religion to that formula. Like Towing Jehovah, The
Eternal Footman got me speculating about the genesis of
ethical behavior, and I concluded that religiously-rooted
narratives like the Good Samaritan certainly have their part to
play.

FJ: In The Eternal Footman you propose two
alternative utopias: Deus Absconditus and Holistica. Which one
would you want to live in and why?

JM: The great challenge I faced in writing The
Eternal Footman was to move beyond my usual anti-religious
satire and offer a few glimpses of a world that has somehow
evolved beyond God. This is Deus Absconditus. It's not Utopia, but
it is a "land of the grown-ups."

Readers who examine my hostility to organized churches closely
will notice the gravamen of my indictment centers on the idea that
religion infantilizes us. In the West, this infantilization
process is displayed in much of our religious rhetoric. God is a
"father." Jesus wants us to approach him as "children." Many
Christians fancy themselves "born again." (Let's remember, to be
"born" means to enter a state of infancy, not a state of
enlightenment.)

Anybody familiar with my oeuvre knows that I think children are
absolutely marvelous beings. But they are not adults. They aren't
obligated to shoulder the same moral responsibilities as
grown-ups. When Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham tells you how the
world works, listen very closely. You will hear a child talking.

Holistica is presented as a kind of New Age alternative to Deus
Absconditus, and I think it's essentially a nightmare. At its
worst, the New Age mentality is no better than the
organized-church mentality. It doesn't just invite us to be
children. It invites us to abandon rationality altogether. It asks
us to be chipmunks.

FJ: In The Eternal Footman, one of your
protagonists, Nora Burkhart, suffers a terrible punishment for
"loving her child too much." Earlier in the story she makes a
choice which she thinks will save her son, but knows it means the
death of many others. Since God is dead, who punishes her?

JM: Nora's situation constitutes the most tragic and
ambiguous trap I've ever set for a protagonist. She's not
fundamentally a victim: indeed, she's the savior of civilization.
But she's still trapped.

When one of my death avatars, Quincy the fetch, tells Nora that
she loved her child too much, he's not necessarily speaking the
truth. A few pages later, Nora's rescuer tells her, "Death is a
lousy philosopher." But I wanted to raise the bedeviling and
maddening idea that, in our determination to do right by our loved
ones, we may do other people harm.

I won't give away the emotional climax of Footman -- I
won't say exactly how Nora is punished -- but her downfall
presumably traces to what, throughout the novel, I call God's
"death throes." Yes, the Supreme Being is "dead," but his dark
side still sends out reverberations, most conspicuously the
fetches. Only after the last fetch vanishes do we truly enter the
"post-theistic age."

FJ: You call yourself a "scientific humanist." What
does that mean?

JM: I like that term -- I first heard it in
connection with Jacob Bronowski -- because there's something
slightly paradoxical and ambiguous about it. And I think that
worthy fiction always partakes of paradox and ambiguity.

C.P. Snow's famous dichotomy between "the two
cultures," scientists versus humanists, goes back to 1962, and I
think it's still very much with us. If anything, the schism has
gotten worse in recent years. Snow was concerned about the failure
of academic humanists to comprehend the insights of science. Today
we have hundreds of postmodern academics who are actually proud
of their failure to comprehend the insights of science -- a pride
in which they are so noisy and articulate and persuasive that they
make someone like myself feel slightly ashamed to be caught using
a phrase like "the insights of science."

The astonishing hoax that Alan Sokal perpetrated six years ago in
the pages of Social Text -- feeding the postmodernists'
catechism back to them in a form so flattering that they didn't
recognize it as a parody -- points up the essential bankruptcy of
the contemporary "science studies" movement. When Swift published
"A Modest Proposal," most educated people understood that he was
being satiric. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Sokal's
"Transgressing the Boundaries" and the faculty of Duke University,
the wellspring of Social Text.

Bronowski liked to point out that science is "a very human
activity." I think he meant that it's a mistake to regard science
as a sterile, passionless, bureaucratic pursuit, destined to turn
us into numbers. But the postmoderns have distorted Bronowski's
idea -- as they have distorted similar ideas drawn from Thomas
Kuhn and Karl Popper -- beyond recognition, casting science as a
mere "metaphor" or "narrative." Bronowski was inviting humanists
to join in the great post-Enlightenment conversation about the
limitations and misuses of scientific knowledge. And the
humanists, to their eternal shame, responded by declaring that the
Enlightenment was dead.

The success of the Sokal hoax makes me especially sad because we do
need a serious critique of science in this culture. The apologists
for the technocratic machine must be countered and contradicted.
But this will never happen by filtering science through the
bizarre epistemologies of French intellectuals. Jacques Derrida
didn't discover the threat to the ozone layer. Scientists did.
(Their names, for the record, were F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario
Molina of the University of California.)

FJ: Your writing has been called everything from
"irreverent" to "blasphemous." How would you characterize your
writing and, given Salman Rushdie's fate, does this vehemence
affect your writing or personal behavior?

JM: Obviously a whole book could be written about the
Rushdie affair and the differences between Western and Islamic
perceptions of fiction and its power over reality. (In fact, whole
books have been written about these matters.) On most days
I don't imagine myself becoming the next Rushdie -- I don't fear
reprisals from Christian militants. At this point in history,
theological satire in the West flies well below the radar of the
religious right. There's no need for me to put a barbed-wire fence
around my house.

Believe it or not, I sometimes wonder if my relentless railing
against Christianity doesn't go too far. At a certain point,
obviously, any sort of blasphemy can become hurtful, irrelevant,
or puerile. But I keep coming back to this question: who struck
first, the satirist or the sacristan? And the answer is clearly,
the latter.

We must be angry about Christianity's historical
complicity in war, slavery, anti-Semitism, and the subjugation of
women. God knows, that's not all we should be angry about.
Secular belief systems also have much to answer for -- maybe they
even have more to answer for. I don't know. But it's my
particular job to keep shouting, "Look where the
theistic-salvationist worldview leads us if we're not careful!"